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Social Work and Sexual and Gender Diversity
Click on each question to check your answer.
1. What are microaggressions? Provide an example.
Microaggressions consist of verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults. They include microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations. Some examples include when a person refuses to use a TSLGBTQ person’s preferred pronoun, or when a trans woman is refused entry into a woman’s shelter.
2. What is internalized oppression?
Internalized oppression refers to the process whereby members of oppressed groups accept and internalize the negative stereotypes and images attached to their group. People experiencing internalized oppression may believe that they are inferior and may be convinced of the superiority of the dominant group.
3. Using the theoretical framework of intersectionality, describe why the “gay village” may be experienced as unsafe for many TSLGBTQ people.
Although the gay village is an important space for socialization for many TSLGBTQ individuals, it is also oftentimes a cis-, White-, and male-dominated space. This means that women, Black and Indigenous people of colour, trans people, and older adults risk facing intersecting experiences of racism, sexism, cissexism, and ageism within these spaces. In addition, gay villages have become highly commercialized spaces, and so poor and working-class queer and trans people, especially those experiencing homelessness, may feel excluded.
4. What is political intersectionality? Provide an example.
Political intersectionality occurs when a specific group of people are situated within two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. For example, queer people of colour often must negotiate their membership in both anti-racist and queer movements. Queer people of colour may experience racism within queer communities and transphobia and/or homophobia within racialized communities.
5. What are two ways that social workers can foster safer and more affirming spaces for TSLGBTQ people?
Social workers can foster safer and more affirming spaces for TSLGBTQ people by allowing people to self-identify; not making assumptions about a person’s sexual and/or gender identity; not assuming that the way a person self-identifies matches their gender expression; validating TSLGBTQ people’s identities and experiences of heterosexism and/or cissexism; having posters and other visual materials that represent TSLGBTQ people; not making assumptions about TSLGBTQ people’s family structures; practising reflexivity; familiarizing themselves with laws and policies that affect TSLGBTQ people; ensuring the implementation of agency policies that address sexual and gender diversity; etc.
6. What is gender dysphoria?
Gender dysphoria is a DSM classification which positions the struggle between gender expression and biological sex as a disorder. Many trans activists have denounced the inclusion of this label in the most recent DSM-V. Others have argued that it serves as a pathway to accessing services such as hormone-replacement therapy and sex-reassignment surgery.
7. How can the term “queer” be both derogatory and empowering?
A single term or label can have different meanings depending on the person and the context. The term “queer” was historically used within Anglo-European and North American contexts as a derogatory term towards non-heterosexual and non-cissexual people. It has more recently been reclaimed by TSLGBTQ people as an umbrella term.